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Farage may be gone but I’m still angry.

Why was the only time his pathetic hate filled rhetoric and fear mongering decently grilled on LBC radio? No disrespect at all to James O’Brien (in fact full credit to him) but why was he the only one who bothered to really interview this man and fact check the reality before Nigel could lie and wriggle his way out of things.

This is why he had so much support. Not because he happened to go to pubs, or do a sterling impression of Dick Van Dyke doing an impression of what an Englishman should say and do, but because he never had the things he said ripped to shreds in public. A man who regularly tripped himself up, with a pantomime cast of a party which kept falling over like the losing side of a racist game of tug of war - why was no one willing to topple him verbally before the election?

The closest we came was Al Murray taking the piss out of him - a very good tactic but why on earth was that pretty much all the opposition he faced?

This angers me because he gained support and stirred up hatred against people who do not look like him, aired them in public and made other people think those views were acceptable. That there will now be a number of people who think it’s probably alright to be a little bit more homophobic down the pub*, because Nigel thinks it’s ok. That it’s ok to put your wife back in her place**, because no one ever managed to justify to Nigel why that isn’t a good thing to do, why being a little bit more overt in your racism***, because let’s face it, Nigel talked about immigration and the rest of the parties started mumbling border control too.

Farage may be gone as an MP, (he’s still an MEP**** though) but the hatred he stirred up remains, and those people will be looking for their next leader. Think some kind of Farage/Griffin hybrid with a dismissive air of nonchalance about how racism starts and occasional nod in dress sense to Enoch Powell - there’ going to be someone waiting in the wings to fill that spot right now. The ignorance throne is empty and there’ll be someone very eager to steal the crown by pushing things just a little bit further to the right.

And with our current government’s education policies in place, how can we even rely on people to read their history books? That’s why a critical media analysis of the xenophobic vitriol must be cultivated if we are not going to be caught in this hateful cycle and setting people against each other due to our differences.

If we do not find a way to counter act this ignorance we are wilfully allowing seeds of segregation to spread through our country. Dismantling of this swing to the Right the rest of Europe is facing needs to start. And it needs to start now.

* Dr Julia Gasper: "As for the links between homosexuality and paedophilia, there is so much evidence that even a full-length book could hardly do justice to the ­subject."
** Nigel Farage: “Working mothers are worth less than men.”
*** Godfrey Bloom: "How we can possibly be giving £1bn a month, when we're in this sort of debt, to Bongo Bongo Land is completely beyond me."
**** A racist twat